A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

Starting in 2014, when the full law takes effect, things will get really ugly. ObamaCare’s “individual mandate” will drive premiums even higher – assuming the courts have not declared it unconstitutional, as they should. Because the penalty for violating the mandate is a fraction of those premiums, healthy people will wait until they are sick to buy coverage, driving premiums higher still. This is already happening in Massachusetts, which enacted a nearly identical law in 2006. ObamaCare’s price controls will force insurers to cover sick patients at artificially low premiums, guaranteeing that insurers will avoid, mistreat, and dump the sick, because that’s what the price controls reward. ObamaCare’s private health-insurance subsidies will expose low-wage workers to implicit tax rates higher than 100 percent, potentially trapping millions in poverty.

But until Congress or the courts discard ObamaCare’s mandates, price controls, and new entitlement spending, there is literally nothing that can arrest this downward spiral of rising costs and deteriorating quality.

The above link will also take you to a counter-point by Kavita Patel of the New America Foundation.

If “the Republicans regain only the House in the upcoming election…the estimated likelihood of at [least] some repeal during the 112th Congress is 52 percent.”

If “Republicans regain both chambers in the upcoming midterm…the estimated likelihood of at [least] some repeal is 59 percent.”

If “Republicans regain unified control of government in 2012…the estimated likelihood of some repeal in the 113th Congress is 69 percent.”

Ragusa is predicting only that the odds are better than 50-50 that Congress will repeal some part of the law, such as the expanded 1099 reporting, which House Democrats have already moved to eliminate because small businesses find it so onerous. He is not laying odds on whether Congress will repeal the entire law or its most important and unpopular provisions (i.e., ObamaCare’s individual mandate).

His post does shed light on the likelihood of repealing the individual mandate, however. As the below graph shows, the probability of repealing any provision of major legislation rises in each of the next five Congresses (i.e., over the subsequent 10 years). After that point, the probability of repeal begins to fall.

Note that this graph shows the instantaneous probability of repeal. The cumulative probability is the area under the curve, and increases monotonically over time. Thus the probability that Congress will repeal some part of ObamaCare by 2020 is more than 13 percent.

Ragusa therefore concludes:

the newly enacted law will be most “at risk” not in the next Congress, but a decade from now. So sit tight.

Politico has obtained and published a confidential messaging-strategy presentation that essentially admits ObamaCare supporters are losing the battle for public opinion. The presentation was delivered to professional leftists by the left-wing Herndon Alliance, based on public opinion research by Democratic pollsters John Anzalone, Celinda Lake, and Stan Greenberg, in a forum organized by the left-wing group Families USA, “one of the central groups in the push for the initial legislation.” It is a stark admission that the public has not warmed to the new health care law, despite predictions that they would do so.

Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and deficit, and instead stressing a promise to “improve it.”

…The confidential presentation … suggests that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. Instead, the presentation is designed to win over a skeptical public, and to defend the legislation — and in particular the individual mandate — from a push for repeal…

The presentation concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college educated women, and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly, many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House’s all-out communications effort.

“Straightforward ‘policy’ defenses fail to [move] voters’ opinions about the law,” says one slide. “Women in particular are concerned that health care law will mean less provider availability – scarcity an issue.”

The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House’s first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed.

“Many don’t believe health care reform will help the economy,” says one slide.

The presentation’s final page of “Don’ts” counsels against claiming “the law will reduce costs and deficit.”

Reason magazine’s Peter Suderman notes that ObamaCare supporters are “backing down from core arguments about cost and deficit reductions in the new health care law… It’s a frank admission that the economic argument in favor of the law has basically failed amongst voters.”

These revelations come at the same time a CNN/Opinion Research poll shows ObamaCare’s individual mandate is increasingly unpopular. Politicoreports:

Just 44 percent favor the health care mandate… Fifty-six percent oppose the mandate, up 3 percentage points from when the bill passed.

Americans still support ObamaCare’s price controls — which force insurance companies to over-charge the healthy and under-charge the sick — by 58-42 percent. But as President Obama has himself acknowledged, those price controls don’t work without the individual mandate. Unless a majority also supports the mandate, you don’t have majority support for either.

The federal government will step in to ensure that the Obama administration’s health care reforms are implemented in every state, Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary, said, amid growing resistance to the changes in some parts of the US and an inability to act in others.

The way the bill is written, it really is a state-based programme with the federal government providing the back-up. So if a state opts not to set up a risk pool, we do it here at the department. If the state opts not to regulate their insurance market, we do it…

It is not a federal takeover, it’s really a partnership.

Yes, a partnership not unlike that between the Soviet Union and, say, Czechoslovakia.

The Obama administration has good reason to emphasize its conception of this “partnership:”

[S]ome big states, including California and Florida, said they did not have the legal authority to enforce the new consumer protection standards, while others face such severe budget crises that they will struggle to pay for provisions, such as the expanded Medicaid services for lower-income groups, required under the law….

Separately, more than 20 states are challenging a mandate that requires almost all Americans to have some form of insurance by 2014 as unconstitutional. A judge in Virginia has said a challenge brought by the state’s attorney-general can proceed, while Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma will soon follow in Missouri’s footsteps by holding yes-or-no referendums on the mandate….

“Federal/state relations is one of the biggest challenges to implementing healthcare reform,” said Diane Rowland, executive vice-president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan health policy group. “Many of the states are facing fiscal crises and they have real capacity issues.”

Sebelius is undeterred:

The legal challenges will work their way through…. It doesn’t slow anything down. This is the law of the land.

Elena Kagan’s confirmation represents a victory for big government and a view of the Constitution as a document whose meaning changes with the times. Based on what we learned the last few months, it is clear that Kagan holds an expansive view of federal power – refusing to identify, for example, any specific actions Congress cannot take under the Commerce Clause. She will rarely be a friend of liberty on the Court.

It is thus telling that Kagan received the fewest votes of any Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court in history, beating the record set only last year by Sonia Sotomayor. Even several senators who had voted for Sotomayor voted against Kagan, including Democrat Ben Nelson – as did Scott Brown, the darling of these high-profile Senate votes.

It was Scott Brown’s election, after all, that signaled that last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey were no fluke, that whether people lived in a Red, Blue, or Purple state, they were tired of bailouts, “stimulus,” re-regulation, and, especially, the government takeover of one-sixth of our economy. This anger has only grown since then, making itself felt most recently in Missouri voters’ overwhelming (71-29) rejection of the individual health insurance mandate.

“Where does the government get the constitutional authority to do this?” the cry goes up across the land. Elena Kagan won’t give a satisfactory answer but the American people are right to continue asking.